Rudolf Beran

Rudolf Beran (28 December 1887 – 23 April 1954) was a Czechoslovak politician who served as prime minister of the country before its occupation by Nazi Germany and shortly thereafter, before it was declared a protectorate. A leader of the Agrarian Party from 1933, he was appointed prime minister by President Emil Hácha on 1 December 1938.

Beran was somewhat ambivalent toward democracy. In the hope of appeasing the Germans after the Munich Agreement, he gathered most of the nonsocialist parties in the Czech lands into the Party of National Unity, with himself as its leader. He also subjected the press to tough censorship, but he presided over granting the Slovaks and Ruthenians' longstanding demands for autonomy. None of the measures was enough to prevent Slovakia from seceding on 14 March, or Germany from occupying the remainder of the country a day later. He then served as the first prime minister of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia until his retirement on 27 April 1939. After he retired, he settled on his farm. During World War II, he had contacts with members of the Czech resistance.

He was arrested in May 1941 by the Germans and spent years in various concentration camps. While he was in custody of the Gestapo in Prague, he had to answer several written questions submitted to him by K.H. Frank, Hitler's Staatsminister of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

After the war, Beran was arrested as a collaborator by the Communist authorities, and in a manipulated political trial was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He died in Leopoldov Prison in 1954.